Ref, You Suck!

Apr 2, 2019

Rage at referees is all the rage in professional sports. Michael Lewis visits a replay center that’s trying to do the impossible: adjudicate fairness. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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so we're walking across the parking lot is caucus New Jersey we're surrounded by concrete nothing green it took a lot to get me to this place their chain hotels and motels in someone's idea of a mall but I have a hunch a suspicion about the crisis that we find ourselves in it's filled with cheap chain restaurants and we're surrounded on all sides by freeways it's like what people think about when they tell jokes about New Jersey I think you can see what's going on right here in Secaucus and we're approaching a four-story rectangular otherwise nondescript concrete building

there's a discreet little sign here that says NBA and shows a logo with a basketball player inside a recent concession to the world we live in the replay Center a place where basketball referees review the calls made by other basketball referees in real time to minimize referee error the replay Center was built to persuade people that life was fair

I'm Michael Lewis and this is against the rules it's a show about will give me just a minute to get to that

this is pink beige it is it doesn't get beige or doesn't it's like this is a place where Brown is an exciting color

and the door is locked all right now

for me this story really begins not in Secaucus but in Berkeley California with my 11 year old son his name's Walker Walker Louis he plays on a basketball team run if you can believe it by a Japanese Buddhist temple my son isn't a Buddhist the most of the time he could pass for one he has no conflict with his teachers or his classmates or his Japanese Buddhist teammates I would say his mind is exactly pure but usually it's calm the exception is when he deals with rafts even Buddhist rafts anytime a ref Blows the Whistle on him he throws up his arms in astonishment and he jumps up and down with his little fist balled up in his mouth clenched tight so everyone knows just how much Injustice he suffering then he marches off with a scowl and he doesn't get over it

after a game this season he gets into the car and starts bitching and moaning all over again

how did it make you feel when the ref made those calls very much do you feel any better now no tell me how it feels

feels like someone keeps poking you in the back of the shoulder and then saying foul foul foul foul have you ever found out in your career no did you know that you are risk of falling out yes but I also knew if I did it would be unfair because I knew that he was calling the stupidest vows he'll look back and say oh I was being huge

asshole

play with the steel clean a foot race cars and try to capture me play with a very deep three the thing is I know I my son does what he does he thinks he's Klay Thompson the All-Star shooting guard of the Golden State Warriors

when clay hits a three clay pounds his chest and points to the sky and so when Walker Louis hits a three he 2 pounds his chest and points to the sky

we have a technical fouls well

play very unusual when Clay is called for a foul he scowled and throws up his arms in astonishment and sometimes even says something to the ref that gets him slapped with a technical foul

and Clay's the famously most laid-back All-Star in the entire National Basketball Association something has happened in the relationship between referees and players over the last I guess you're too that's Ramona Shelburne she's covered the NBA for the last decade for ESPN it's been quite frankly ugly this year one of the Warriors head butted a ref another chucked his disgusting mouth guard off a refs chest

he's already has a technical and some of the stuff I've seen I mean when Draymond Green is getting fined for calling Lauren whole cap and can we cuss on your podcast I think we already have you know I fucking bitch like like when he is saying that to a female referee and getting fined and suspended for that man that's next level and I haven't seen that before at this season it's the stars now who are really pushing the issue right it's Kevin Durant getting thrown out of games it's Steph Curry getting thrown out

A Warrior's have completely unraveled

in a single season bad behavior got various Golden State Warriors tossed out of ten different basketball games Kevin Durant their best player tied a league record by getting tossed from five games all by himself the men who coached the Stars aren't much better even Steve Kerr the Warriors famously decent Civic minded coach I can snap I can completely lose it if you back away from the Golden State Warriors I mean they're Exemplar is of the way people should behave the especially your stars the like impeccably behaved people I'm so pleased to have my son emulating your players the only time they have problems really is with referees yeah I can't imagine you in your life have another relationship like you have with referees no you're right you're right I would never say the things that I do to referees to a person in normal life it happens two or three times a year and I've been caught on camera you know

em effing ref you know my daughter will send me a text like that what are you doing it's all over Twitter I can read your lips this is embarrassed and I'm embarrassed so why is that you know it's a sense of right or wrong you know what I feel like there's like this personal offense like something unfair as happening

which brings me to my hunch it has to do with referees and not just basketball referees

the people everywhere charged not just with enforcing rules but with preserving a sense of fairness on Wall Street in the news in courts of law in the many little disputes that pockmark everyday life there are many different kinds of rafts and most of them are under some kind of attack so maybe it's not that surprising that Americans one day woke up and thrilled to the message that life was unfair you know the system folks is rigged

it's a recession rigged economy banking system is rigged it rigged system there's a lot of things that are rigged in this world of ours not to fanus that we grew up believing that America was about which brings me to what this show is about the people whose job it is to maximize fairness not just in sports but most everywhere what's happening to them tells us a lot about what's happening to us

you have to listen closely but you can hear that same Chan in a lot of American Life ref you suck

here we go back at the NBA's offices in Secaucus New Jersey someone eventually came in unlock the door and then they led me down a hall filled with a lot of old basketball stuff jerseys and bobbleheads and basketball and posters of Michael Jordan the replay Center was the ultimate man cave looks like man cave right do we know how many it's also the latest weapon in the battle for fairness this place just on first view is amazing it's wall-to-wall screens 110 of them with on them is whatever is captured by all the cameras in 29 NBA arenas across the country this isn't the broadcast video with commercials and commentary the screens here don't even have the scores of the games on them or the names of the teams playing and they're muted

would you here is referees staring at basketball games what you see is nothing but angles on professional basketball courts

nobody's ever walked in here and walk down satisfy sucks and I'm not going to say it sucks eat that's Joe Borgia who designed the center back in 2014 and now runs it before he volunteered for a Secaucus Duty he refereed NBA games his father was an NBA ref before him with a break in the late 60s a Borgia has been roughing professional basketball games since 1946 if you went back to the Dear Dad at the beginning of his career and said this is what it's going to look like what do you think he'd have said if I told them we would have replay he turn over in his grave forget about a replay Center at that right oh absolutely you see the refs used to insist on their Authority at any rate everyone agreed that there was no better way to ensure the fairness of the game then to let the ref play God

the replay Center is an admission that the ref is not God that he makes mistakes I think the mention of Replay none of us liked it when we first heard it it's a necessary evil it's necessary you have to have it today everything is taped now everyone pays more attention to the referees mistakes so the NBA has to as well now when a ref thinks he might have screwed up some call or didn't get a good look at the action he Twirls his fingers in the air that's the signal to the ref in the replay Center who goes to work reviewing the tape looking for the best angle to figure out what actually happened that's the thing is everybody can see it now exact you can't have them be in a better position to judge the game and the referees Absol the replay Center is what allows rests on a basketball court to change their calls a lot of those calls are subjective like whether one player fouled another

the rest on the court still make most of those calls themselves the exception is when the foul is flagrant sure degree

there's blood on the screens Kevin Love's front tooth got knocked in love plays for the Cleveland Cavaliers and the question is did the guy who popped him in the mouth do it intentionally the basketball find common log happens to move into where two guys elbow was going on the rest need to decide if the violence was not just excessive but unsportsmanlike which sounds archaic because we sort of lost the concept so the blood doesn't swim the decision mom has a lot of contacts on a lot of the toxin oh I was accidentally possible

the players all stand around scratching themselves while the rest put on headsets and talk to the replay Center we're looking for the unnatural did he throw his elbow out so the fat would leave the foul was on Kevin Love I thought he was outside he was moving yeah the whole thing only takes 30 seconds 30 seconds in which players fans coaches get even more pissed off at the rest for taking so long the only thing stopping the replay center from checking every decision is that it slows the game down here in Secaucus is still trying to figure out how they might talk to the rafts as they run up and down the court because if they could do that they could just fix every call on the Fly Special Forces we found that we actually use a chip over the molar that worked off the vibration of the bone believe or not we'd that we got a handful of Gigli referees molded and we tested that to wear a chip over there moly

but it wasn't good enough because they didn't know where the voice was coming from it was just a voice in their heads I didn't know where was that a coach soccer this is actually insane the time and money now being spent to ensure the fairness of what after all is just a basketball game a jillion miles of fiber-optic cable connect this room directly to the NBA arenas around the country all for two calls a game at Two Poles again 15 million dollars to build this room to get to Cole's right to game but you gotta do it you gotta do it

can I just pause here a moment just to consider what the NBA has done in the past few years to improve the calls for example they brought in serious managers to hire and train the rest Joe Borgia calls his boss the general because she's actually a general and an Air Force pilot her name is Michelle Johnson and before she supervised Denby a rest she ran the Air Force Academy

it sounds like Overkill to use a general to make sure a basketball games are well raft but the NBA thought it needed Overkill or at least Adam Silver the NBA commissioner did if people don't believe that the league office is unbiased and that the officials are unbiased you're going to have a problem regardless of the accuracy of the calls silver took over in 2014 and also hired Joe Borgia to create the replay Center since then the NBA commission's taken a ridiculous amount of grief for trying to improve Justice in basketball there are a group of people who think that without the sort of transparency that we see in this day and age that it enabled certain officials and maybe with it with a touch of Frontier Justice to overall create more of a fair environment even if that were true and I'm not sure it is those days are over and I think it's whether it's in sports or other walks of life that you cannot turn the clock back on transparency

so here's what else Silver's done he's brought in the pool of people from which refs are selected they used to be mostly white men mostly from the same background at one point 15 years ago for NBA rest came from the same high school he's hired more black refs and female refs

he's insisted that referees be physically fit so they can get into position to see all the plays while everyone else in America is getting fatter the rest are getting buff

they're also not getting new feedback on all their bad calls silver decided to publish the mistakes made by every ref in the last two minutes of every game so everyone could see them he gives the team's and the rest a private document listing every refereeing mistake all this new data on rafts means that we and they know all sorts of strange things about their minds for instance we now know that their calls have tended to favor whichever teams losing their calls also favored the home team some large part of home court advantage is just the refs the analytics Department of the Houston Rockets is even done a study that shows that the home team that gets the best calls is the Utah Jazz why Utah who knows but you can be sure that someone will figure that out

is now basically a small army of Geeks analyzing all this new data

look I don't really like writing papers about sports further I think about the economy that's Justin wolfers a behavioral Economist at the University of Michigan and the co-author of a paper about NBA rafts but the thing is this is a domain where the NBA referees have tremendous incentives not to make the wrong call every error they make is tracked those errors determine whether they get more games those games determine how much they get paid this is arguably the most analyzed Workforce in the country basketball referees are now picked apart in ways that not long ago would have seemed Preposterous not just for the fairness of their calls but for their unconscious Behavior wolfers took years of data from every NBA game then he set out to look for evidence of the refs racial bias the question here is not whether people are anti-black or anti-white but when there's an in-group bias so if a if a predominantly black team is playing and the refereeing crew is predominantly white

they more fouls called against them then on night when the same team is playing with a predominantly black refereeing crew and it turns out the answer is yes offers wrote his paper back in 2007 before this new age of referee transparency well it was a bit of lesson for me you can probably tell by my accent Michael I'm an Australian you know I thought it was interesting piece of social science and it turned out the New York Times put it on the front page and the NBA wasn't happy the commissioner at the time attack the study and embarrass the league by trying and failing to refute its findings this morning we'll hear from the NBA commissioner David Stern referees are the most reviewed most ranked and most rated and that's why we take exception to what the times did here that's turn on NPR in 2007 the result of all this coverage every single referee was made aware of his unconscious bias when the dust settled Justin wolfers was curious to know if his paper it had any effect

he made another study of referees after the controversy had created and guess what the most recent study that we did seems to suggest that that form of racial bias is gone away he has no idea why maybe simply making the rest of where of the problem was enough to correct it but in the end this became a case study not in ref ineptitude but ref reform NBA refs have achieved what police forces can only dream of race blindness the refs have no choice the world's not too good at seeing their mistakes

look there's no way any basketball referee is going to be perfect but there's also no way these refs are anything but more accurate than they've ever been I mean even home court advantage means less than it used to and yet these refs are treated as if they're trying to rig the games

does the sound of those 18,000 people screaming at you are booing you does it sound any different than it sounded when you started in 1991 yeah there's there's a little more anger involved and you know it used to be sort of of the garden-variety you're terrible you suck any of those kinds of terms that's Monty McCutchen who recently quit reffing NBA games to serve as a kind of life coach to the other NBA rest to talk them through their problems now you know people do their research they things are out there on the internet they know your record with the with their team they they've done all there's all these sites on all these different know personal things about you sure of course some death threats are made from time to time and playoff series and you'll get security all the way to both the hotel and then Hotel the next morning out to the airport security to the hotel not every night but when those threats are are a known factor that has happened in my career security to your car is mandatory

I yep these days refs need bodyguards to escape after the game here are people who are mostly just trying to do these extremely difficult jobs as well as they can and at some point you feel is question rising up in you in me it rose up while I was talking to Ramona Shelburne the ESPN reporter why would anybody want to be a ref seriously I wonder that too man oh my God no they are not allowed to say anything they're not allowed to explain themselves and not allowed to defend themselves look obviously they get paid they started a hundred and fifty Grand a year and if they're great at their job and work extra games they can make as much as 500 but there are lots of ways to get paid without spending half your life in hotel rooms and the other half being insulted by Arenas filled with crazy people do you think the refereeing has gotten worse or better actually think it's gotten better of course it's gotten better how could it not have the mystery is why the stars and the coaches and the fans act as if it's gotten worse

I have a hunch about that to which you'll hear in a minute

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Okay so Sacramento's checking in right there there it is on our before

Clippers Golden State will check in and the Clippers will check in about the 9:30 roughly

I'm back with Joe Borgia in the replay Center the refs here sit dressed in black staring at screens waiting for a signal from somewhere in America the end of games is when they get most involved because that's when fans and coaches and players are most likely to accuse some ref of having made the mistake that change the outcome of course a mistake at the beginning has just as much effect on a game as a mistake at the end but the end is what people notice and get outraged about

so the Justice at the end of the game must be more exact than it is at the beginning

these replay Center refs have video technicians with them who can freeze a moment on screen then zoom out or zoom in so that the entire screen contains only a player's fingertips or his toes here you just scroll through tiny slivers of the game not the game itself the sliver is wearing justices might occur I mean goodness gracious if you don't have slow motion in here a freeze frame it's very difficult of course in slow motion you can see things that the naked eye mrs. magician sometimes perform during half times of the NBA games when job or just slows it down he can see how they do their tricks it's kind of the same thing with the players exactly I can go with sixtieth of a second at a time you're going to take a lot of little things are what these players are getting good at is creating optical illusions and then it comes to sort of the sort of things that a magician doesn't isn't flopping an optical illusion flopping is what they call it when a player pretends to have been knocked over by another player

tricking the refs into making bad calls is now considered a skill replay signal given so you just hit it perfect a game ref in Houston Twirls his fingers in the air some players in a three-point shot at the buzzer yeah or has he the Houston ref wants to know if the players toe was on the three-point line and if he got off the shot before the buzzer equipment it's just now that Joe says I can work the equipment can I just hit the road

truth is I'm not a big equipment guy my first step when something needs to be assembled or operated is to call someone and say I'll pay whatever it costs I start twisting dials just to see what happens they appear to cause the picture to zoom in and out of the screen there's you're sick yeah you gotta see that you have to see the referee doing that like reading someone may say something

potential there's a lot of subjectivity in reffering but a whole bunch of the questions that arise on a basketball court have objective answers like who touched the ball last before it went out of bounds or was there still time on the clock before the shot left the players hands this is one of those did the player's foot touch the three-point line when he left for his shot did the ball leave his fingertips before the buzzer sounded one of the dials or maybe it's actually a joystick lets me choose which angle the court I see

I need to find one still frame with the shooters foot in it and another with a clock in it then I need to freeze the picture in the one sixtieth of a second that the ball left the shooters fingertips just then I realize I have no idea who the player is I don't even know which team he's on

all I know is he's in Houston I can I get out of here not quite these are all the same are they okay so it's pretty much you name it Houston still waiting on me oh I did that I think it occurred to me at that moment that they were possibly actually using what I was doing and that there's a little bit of anxiety the coaches get to stop the game with pointless timeouts the advertisers get to stop the game to sell beer but when a ref stops a game to make it more fair the crowd Boos and the announcers launch attacks on them it's not enough to be right you've got to be fast

Borgia tracks the average response time of the replay refs it's between 20 and 30 seconds the replay Center officials confirm successful three-point basket you got it

the problem is dealt with our thinking is but right away another one comes up on a bunch of screens showing one Arena all these people are jumping around and hollering at rest the Ruckus appears to be confined to Cleveland but in here it feels like the entire universe is Disturbed it turns out LeBron James is upset he's arguing there he goes Ron G is going from ref giraffe he seems to know which rests to argue with the talking about goaltending

so they're talking about they're talking about I think they might change the James is James any other guy had the best angle do you think that LeBron James has any effect doing that

the ref in Cleveland is not twirling his finger there's no signal to us to do anything in the replay Center LeBron's drama strictly speaking is pointless it's strange the way these players argue they must think that if they make life unpleasant enough for the ref you'll think twice before the next call

it's then that it occurs to me just looking around the room at a hundred and ten TV screens I've had a hard time following the game's never mind the scores I sometimes don't even know which teams are playing but every time a player gets up into a referee's face I've recognized the player and I actually don't know that many NBA players but I know all the ones who pitch these Hissy Fits because the only players getting up into the faces of the refs are the famous players or the coaches who protect them Ramona Shelburne put her finger on it the more aggressive behavior towards rafts isn't coming from every player that's coming from the Stars

so we just got really interested in a very simple question of does this sense of being privileged make you disobey the rules of the road of the laws of the land that's dacher Keltner he's a professor of psychology at Cal Berkeley and someone who wanders about the effect inequality has on people's behavior and experience I had in Berkeley where I was riding my bike up this hill and I got to the four-way stop sign and I was halfway through this four-way stop sign

and this guy in a black Mercedes roll through the stop sign is halfway there is a foot away from me about to take me out and he's on his cell phone and I looked at him I was ready to take him on like all right buddy this is it and what was most telling about this whole experience was he looked at me as if I was in the wrong and I should get out of his way and you know even though I had made it through the stop sign first so Decker and a colleague dreamed up this weird experiment they hid to Berkeley undergraduates in the bushes near four-way stop signs

the undergrads noted the makes of all cars coming through the intersection assign them numbers 125 according to their market value a new Mercedes was a five a Honda was a three and an old Pacer was a one we positioned a Berkeley undergrad by a pedestrian Zone and we make sure they look like they want to cross the street right and they're sort of Leaning Into The Pedestrian Zone where it's required by California law to stop it's a game of one-on-one at a California crosswalk one car versus one pedestrian and 0% of the drivers of poor cars Zoom Through The Pedestrian Zone they all stopped and 40 some odd percent 45 percent of the drivers of the 5 the 5S the rich cars Blaze Through The Pedestrian Zone and to say the rules don't apply to me I'll carry on

this one study led to a bunch of others that showed basically the same pattern of human behavior another experiment we bring people to the lab and as they're leaving there's this big bowl of candy and it's like and it says on it for the children of the Institute of human development on the ball and we say oh you know take a candy or two if you're as you're leaving and well to we count up how many candies they take after they leave the experiment privileged people grab a big handful of candy compared to poor people so let's turn the conversation something much more important which is basketball most important of all in the last five or six years the NBA has embarked on essentially a dramatic reform of refereeing at the same time the friction between the players and some of the owners and some of the coaches and the rest is going through the roof the source of the outrage is the star players the people getting thrown out of games or Kevin Durant and Steph Curry and James Harden yeah and the

the most famous team ever to walk on the court are the chief culprit is exhibit a in bad behavior towards rafts so you got this weird combination as fascinating you know I still remember being a Lakers fan you know the great Magic Johnson teams and watching Larry Bird do his nine-step layup and I'm not come on make the call you know Larry Bird was like LeBron the new Mercedes of his day he played with certain assumptions about the rules and how they applied to him for most players of his era two steps counted his traveling the inequality on a basketball court is profound it's profound and it's more profound that wasn't Larry Bird's era Larry Bird was a millionaire LeBron James might be a billionaire yeah and these guys are Global franchise yeah so you got in a funny way a microcosm it's not microcosm on a basketball court of what's going on in the larger society

the NBA is set out to ref the game more objectively more accurately more fairly this is in Rage the stars and their fans and coaches you want to know why the more objectivity there is the less power they have objective rafts eliminate some of their privilege

the Stars can't get the calls anymore just because they're stars or anyway not as often

LeBron James and Kevin Durant and Steph Curry and Klay Thompson they'll all survive better refs because they're actually just better than everyone else they don't need unfairness to win but what happens where there are no replay centers where there's no hope for Pure objectivity or technology to improve calls where the refs can no longer defend themselves from the Stars welcome to the reason for our show

I think American life just now has at least one thing in common with basketball the authority of its referees is under attack and when you have a weak referee you have a big problem because a week referee is a referee who can be bought or intimidated or just simply ignored

a situation goes from being more or less well refereed to more or less not then one day you wake up in a world that seems not just unfair but actually sort of rigged that is it's incapable of becoming Fair because the people who benefit from the unfairness have the power to preserve it boom

do you do you flip a switch in a hundred and ten screens go dark

all the law small screens you got to do manually the big TVs we got the remote for but the most nights job or just stays at the replay Center until almost two in the morning just him and a couple of reps staring at tiny sliver has a basketball games trying to impose Justice on powerful people who don't want it you got it you do you have to be partially off oxygen to the hundred percent negative fists 100% negative business it's why my son doesn't want to rock that unlike people yelling at me one day a young Borgia naturally becomes a referee the next he doesn't one day most people think the refs are more or less fair or at any rate they don't spend a lot of time blaming them for all their problems the next day they wake up to radical inequality the people on top the elites think they're special they behave as people do when they think they're special young

emulate them without even thinking about it they just assume that's how you act if you're a star or want to be my first question is why when you hit a three point shot which you often do why in the past have you patted your chest and pointed to the sky I did it because the people on the NBA and the I did it what do you think they're doing it like what does it mean I don't know just like I'm cool do you believe in God no II knew it what it I mean now I know what it meant but no I don't so what does it mean

basically it's like thank you God for hitting a three point shot do you do you think God was responsible when Klay Thompson hit a three-point shot to be honest if God was watching over everybody whenever they hit a three point shot

I don't think that he would be able to like actually make make them make the shop so do you have anything you'd like to say to the referees of the world before we turn this recording off don't pick sides unless it's my side thank you

I'm Michael Lewis thanks for listening to against the rules it's our first episode we've got a lot more to come against the rules is brought to you by Pushkin Industries the shows produced by Audrey dilling and Catherine Jared oh with research assistance from Zoe Oliver gray our editor is Julia Barton Mia Lobel is our executive producer our theme was composed by Nick brutal with additional scoring by Seth Samuel mastering by Jason gambrel our show was recorded at Northgate studios in Berkeley by Topher Ruth

special thanks to our Founders Jacob Weisberg and Malcolm Gladwell